


When The World Don't Orbit Around You

by Tabbyluna



Category: Skylanders (Video Games)
Genre: Backstory, Character Study, Gen, Riches to Regular Person, The Trap Team
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-02
Updated: 2020-08-02
Packaged: 2021-03-06 03:34:48
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,150
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25666774
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Tabbyluna/pseuds/Tabbyluna
Summary: And that day, about a year after she left Metallana, was when she officially welcomed herself to the real world.
Kudos: 1





	When The World Don't Orbit Around You

**Author's Note:**

> Well, guess I'm eating my words. School stuff is coming up, so I can't write as much as I used to. And for some reason I'm also executive dysfunctioning a lot nowadays. So... yeah. Have this thing I wrote ages ago.

Sometimes, Gearshift thought back about her old life as a princess. The shiny floors and walls of the castle, all chrome and polished by servant units. Her schedule, all activities planned out for her by a carefully constructed algorithm. And then there was her father, King Mercurus. A brilliant man, an absolute genius. His ancestors before him might have constructed the kingdom of Metallana, but he was the one who brought it to prosperity. At the height of his success, he had constructed her. Loved her and raised her as a daughter. Treated her like his little princess, because that was what she literally was.

Everything he did, he did it for her. Inventing nanny-bots to look after her. Tutor-bots to educate her. Any maintenance was done by him and him only, as he knew her best. And he always remembered to discuss with her what new features she wanted when it was time for an upgrade. To the best of his abilities, he always delivered. No doubt, King Mercurus was a loving father. And Gearshift’s life as a princess was practically a bed of roses.

But there was this saying, one that she heard the other Trap Masters using. What was it… ah, right. ‘The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence’. As a child, her life as a princess was rosy and sweet. Anything she wanted, she could get. She had no fears of kidnappings or rusting, thanks to the protection of the castle. All servants were told to respect her wishes, unless it could potentially hurt her. In an objective sense, she really had it good.

But if she were to just raise her head a little, look to her sides while riding in the limousine, or while marching in parades, she could always see the citizens around her. Living their lives, foreign but fascinating. The green pastures to her red roses. And when she was new to the world, the way they lived always used to spark her curiosity.

She asked her father a billion questions about the world out there, and he always answered happily. He thought that she simply wanted answers, so he answered as well and as vividly as he could to sate that curiosity. 

But King Mercurus was a great storyteller. It was a natural gift. And great storytellers knew how to make a person desire something they never knew existed previously. From there, that was when his answers gave birth to her fascination with the outside world. She spent her classes daydreaming, thinking about all the underground labyrinths and the lives of the hundreds of commoners he described. 

When she got a bit older, she eventually grew to hate her lessons on how to be a proper princess. She disliked feeling overprotected by the nanny-bots, who always stopped her from doing anything fun. As a young bot, she was fairly adventurous. King Mercurus used to describe her as spunky and spirited when in a good mood, and reckless and irresponsible when in a bad one. But she simply could not help it. She loathed boredom, and to her, at the time, her duties as a princess were the dullest thing to have ever existed. 

It was why she snuck out so often. Life in the depths of Metallana was simply much more interesting than her studies. There, she got to get her hands dirty, working and learning alongside the workers down there. She loved it down there. The seemingly infinite area to explore, the smell of motor oil and fuel, the way she got to move and work with her hands. Most days, she would end up dirty and in desperate need of a recharge. And it was not a great feeling, but in a weird way it did feel satisfying. It was a tangible, physical sign that she had worked hard all day. Proof that she had contributed to something, even if it meant getting messy in the process.

Back then, and even now, she believed that she learned more about her kingdom talking to her subjects than sitting in a classroom. From them, she heard first-hand accounts of Metallana’s history. Tales of how and why certain mechanics were implemented to keep the kingdom running. From a young age, she found that she best learned through storytelling, and the workers were all excellent wordsmiths. Every day, when they worked, she practically begged them to keep telling her more tales about their lives, about their history. 

And if she was nice and polite about it, which she tried hard to be most of the time, they would.

In the past, she thought that she would have loved a life like that. Not necessarily one where she worked under the city, making sure that it ran. More like, one where she could be active, where she did not have to sit down and be a symbol to the people. A life of activity, of being surrounded by people as equally hands-on and practical. Which was why when she got invited to join the Skylanders, she jumped at the opportunity. 

And then that was when she realised that there was a lot more to the real world than she had originally thought. 

She had considered herself relatively earthy and practical back home. And she had expected herself to fit right in with the rest of the crew. For the most part, they were a decent lot. She liked them, and they liked her.

But then she learned very early on that she was the only one in her team to have ever had the opportunity to learn about quantum physics. She cracked a joke, no one else laughed. And after some confusion and discussions about their history with education, she learned that most of them had worked in trades. They never went to higher-learning institutes. Meanwhile, she had access to her father’s grand library since the day she was born. Scientific literature about robotics were practically her bedtime stories. 

And that was when she realised that there was a lot more to life as an ‘independent worker’, as she often called them, than she had thought.

Most of the Trap Masters found her a little weird. Her demeanour and mannerisms had been described as rough on the battlefield, and she was certainly respected as a warrior. But off the battlefield, after missions when she was just hanging with the rest of them? Well…

“You’re very delicate you know.”

“Yeah, you’ve got a real dainty way of moving around.”

“Sometimes, you really do kind of remind me of this porcelain doll I had when I was younger. She was really pretty and kind of fragile, and I used to think she was a princess too.”

She could not even remember who said what to her, but the phrases stuck in her memory for a long, long time.

Princess. When she was younger, she used to hate being called that title. She hated how every book she read associated princesses with weaknesses, with fragility, with softness. As a child, she saw herself as tough and gutsy. Reading books, she liked to see herself in the warriors protecting an island, or as a knight protecting a lady. Did her friends… really see her as a ‘princess’? Beyond her literal title, did she really come off like a gentle dame? A fragile lamb?

She wanted to think otherwise. But admittedly, she was not exactly the best at living independently. Multiple incidents stuck out in her mind. Her first time entering a supermarket, her first attempt cleaning a toilet, her first time changing a bed cover. And many more incidents, most of them her embarrassing first times doing chores. All those times, she needed to call in one of her friends to teach her or accompany her. Sometimes she needed to explain how biology for her model worked. She had their faces stuck in her memory forever. Those faces which sent a clear message to her, that what she was talking about was ‘T.M.I’.

Well, to borrow a term the team threw around a lot. Someone said it during the toilet cleaning episode, and it became integrated into her vocabulary ever since.

One night, about a year after she left her old kingdom, she had just tried learning about how to change a lightbulb. It took multiple tries, but Knight Light and Knight Mare eventually got her to do it all by herself. It was a great victory for her, even if she had to go through fifteen lightbulbs before she could do it. Knight Mare was getting snippy after she broke number five. Knight Light remained constantly chipper through it all, bless his heart.

That night, after a day of patrols and lightbulb changes and one very impatient centaur, a familiar feeling of exhaustion overtook her again. But she did not feel terribly sleepy yet. So instead, she sank into her bean bag to take some time to reflect. When she joined the Skylanders, she had left with nothing but her weapon, her recharge station, and a writing kit (because her father wanted to hear about how she was doing, bless him). 

Back then, her empty dorm room with its bare, colourless walls and flickering lights was the smallest room she had ever lived in. Her old bedroom was at least ten times as large. It only seemed smaller because it was decorated. The only other furniture in the room was a desk and a small closet. Everything else, she needed to add herself. At first she was so overwhelmed too. At least back when she explored the depths of her kingdom, she could return to a fully furnished bedroom, a father, and a small army of servants. The workers saw her as a kid, and thus looked out for her as a kid. But now she was a grown woman in every sense of the word. She had seen battles, she had come of age. Now, she truly had to do everything by herself, as was expected of her. 

Every single decorative aspect in the room, from the walls painted orange and gold, to the lava lamp on the desk, to those curtains which ended up slightly ruined thanks to the washing machine (how was she supposed to know the pattern would fade?). Every single item in that room had been earned by her. Through a lot of effort on her part, and usually with a little help from her friends. Head Rush and Ka-Boom helped pay for the lava lamp. Snap Shot took her out to buy curtains because she did not know how. And the walls… Short Cut of all people had to teach her the basics of painting. 

_ Short Cut. _

It did not say promising things about her.

In the grand scheme of things, she could actually be quite useless. At least, that's what she thought. She had told herself many times in the past, over and over again, that she was tough. She was a brave young woman, making her way through life as a warrior. But some of her teammates were also brave young warrior women. And they could buy a set of curtains without help.

It was terribly embarrassing, how her old royal status had hindered her. And seated alone by herself, in her tiny room, in her bean bag chair which she learned how to sew from Head Rush (who had been repairing her own clothes since she was nine!). This was her life now. An ex-princess. A girl who was a great warrior woman by day, but when the time came for her to stop fighting, and to live, she hadn’t a clue about where she should begin.

And sometimes, she felt like going home. Back to the castle and Metallana where things were familiar. Where she could be waited on, and she could stop embarrassing herself with her lack of practical skills. But that would mean giving up. And even though having her bubble burst was uncomfortable, she hated giving up even more. It went against all the things she was taught. And if she ever thought of quitting, there would always be a terrible nagging voice in her head scolding her for it.

Currently, she was somewhere in between ‘strong, independent warrior’ and ‘dainty, semi-useless princess’. And it was certainly not the best position to be in. But at the same time, it wouldn’t do her any good to go crying home now. No matter how hard things got. If anything, she needed to live through this a little more. She had lived a year by herself, and she was sure she could live a little bit longer. Just wait a while, and someday she would grow used to it.

And that day, about a year after she left Metallana, was when she officially welcomed herself to the real world. 

**Author's Note:**

> Side note, but this is the 69th story I posted here. Nice.


End file.
